I, Grinder
Jonathan Oxer, outgoing president of the Linux Australia community group, likes to modify the electronics in and around his home. So why bother fiddling around with door keys every day? He took the lateral route.
Oxer is one of the few people in the world to have been surgically implanted with an RFID chip. When he swipes it past the RFID reader attached to his front door, the tag in his upper forearm unlocks the door.
“The door to my office also has a homemade RFID reader so I can unlock the door with a tag, but unfortunately this particular one doesn’t work with the tag in my arm.”
Oxer’s front door RFID reader
Just about every aspect of his home-life — from checking the mail to watering the garden or opening blinds — can be controlled through a software environment.
The front gate and letterbox of Oxer’s home come complete with Ethernet connectivity, allowing him to be notified when somebody enters the property or when the postman delivers mail.
“It’s such a pain walking to the letterbox to see if you’ve got mail!”
“I’ve setup a system that detects when a letter has been inserted into the letterbox, and that can be acted upon by a computer that can send me an SMS or an email to say that I’ve got mail. It doesn’t really matter what it does – once you’ve got it in the realm of software you can control it.”
You can read all about Oxer’s suburban tech at the Australian Computerworld.
House hacks… Scary thought.
If I wasn’t paranoid about the whole chip thing going on in the States, that would be pretty damn cool.
The problem is, there’s no point implanting an rfid into your arm. Why not a ring or something else you carry round with you all the time? Unless you’re actually benefitting from putting the rfid under your skin, all you’re doing is dating yourself and tying yourself to an old piece of technology. I get that grinding is modifying yourself, but surely there should be a purpose to it and a reason for it. Maybe it’s the trade off of art and engineering? Do you do it cos it’s cool, or is it cool cos you do it?
Dating yourself.
I only just see the other meaning that phrase would hold as I type it, but anyway…
That’s an interesting idea. And it makes me think of characters with outdated servomotor-based arms and such in various old cyberpunk pieces, and how some wore them as a badge of pride, while others looked down upon them as inferior.
It does make sense to try to make your grinding future-proof. This guy can always remove the RFID and replace it with something new, couldn’t he? I wonder, though, if that kind of thing will get harder as implantable technology becomes more organic…
Yes, I was very aware of the issue of technology obsolescence when I was doing it, and that’s one of the reasons the chip is in my arm and not in my hand. My original intention was to put it in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, but the problem is that with any procedure like this scar tissue will always develop so it’s not as simple as pulling out an old chip and inserting a new one. I didn’t want to waste a prime implantation site on a chip that I knew would be obsolete. What I really want is a chip that incorporates crypto and mass storage (ideally 16G+) and even now 2 years after doing the implant there’s nothing with that much storage available.
hey Jonathon – thanks for stopping by!
i’m sure a bunch of us have questions for you.
for starters – did you have any dramas getting the RFID implant?
[...] duplicating Pseudoscience’s post too much, I wanted to explore the state of RFID implants in a tad more [...]
[...] you know of out there, EMAIL ME! m1k3y AT grinding DOT be). We’ve mentioned Jon Oxer on here a few times, but the details were [...]